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In the latest diplomatic tit-for-tat with the US, China announced Monday that it would impose visa restrictions on US government officials who “behave egregiously” in connection to Hong Kong affairs, according to the South China Morning Post. Chinese Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian urged Washington to stop meddling in Hong Kong affairs and warned that Beijing would use powerful countermeasures if the US continues to interfere. 

“The U.S. is attempting to obstruct China’s legislation for safeguarding national security in the HK SAR (Hong Kong Special Administrative Region) by imposing the so-called sanctions, but it will never succeed,” he told reporters. “In response … China has decided to impose visa restrictions on U.S. individuals with egregious conduct on HK related issues” he said quoted by Reuters.

“Who will be the targets? Relevant people would know clearly themselves,” he added.

Zhao also told reporters that China has lodged a complaint with the U.S. over the bill and warned that Beijing will respond with strong countermeasures in response to U.S. actions on Hong Kong.

Monday’s announcement is in retaliation for Washington’s decision last week to restrict visas for Chinese government officials who threaten Hong Kong’s autonomy. 

“No matter how Hong Kong separatists squawk, and no matter what kind of pressure is exerted by external anti-China forces, their scheme to obstruct the passage of the Hong Kong national security law will never prevail, and the bill is but a piece of waste paper,” he added, referring to the US Senate’s passage of the Hong Kong Autonomy Act last week. 

Last week, Mike Pompeo said that US visa restrictions would apply to “current and former officials” of China’s ruling Communist Party, “believed to be responsible for, or complicit in, undermining Hong Kong’s high degree of autonomy.” European Union leaders recently told Chinese President Xi Jinping of “negative consequences” if it passes the law in Hong Kong. 

The latest flare up in tensions is as a result of China controversial national security law which allows Beijing to set up a national security office in Hong Kong, which will gather intelligence and “handle crimes” against national security. The move will allow China to counter pro-democracy protesters and “foreign forces” (i.e., the US) who attempt to destabilize Hong Kong. 

The tit-for-tat visa restrictions come as tensions between Beijing and Washington are flaring up over trade deal purchase commitments, origins of the virus pandemic, and territory disputes in the South China Sea. 

As the pace of Pakistan’s coronavirus outbreak continues to quicken, infuriating the country’s leadership as India’s out-of-control outbreak increasingly seeps across the border, a gang of separatist militants have just carried out one of the most memorable terror attacks in Pakistan in recent memory.

According to the AP, a gang of four militants from a separatist group called the Baluchistan Liberation Army attacked the stock exchange in the southern Pakistani port city of Karachi on Monday, killing at least three people, including two guards and a police officer. The attack began when the men walked up to the gate in front of the exchange and fired on the guards. It’s unclear whether they gained access to the building, but all four assailants were swiftly killed during the police response. No brokers or employees at the exchange were wounded.

Inside the stock exchange, broker Yaqub Memon described what the attack was like. He said he and most of the employees hid inside during the attack, until the assailants were killed. After the attack ended, all the brokers and employees were moved to a single secured room while police swept the building for bombs. Shazia Jehan, a police spokesman, sad a bomb unit swept and cleared the building.

Images of police surrounding the high-walled stock exchange compound proliferated on social media. Karachi is known as Pakistan’s financial center, and its stock exchange is owned by the same company that owns the exchanges in Islamabad and Lahore.

The separatist group, the Baluchistan Liberation Army, was previously best known for an attack on the Chinese consulate in Karachi back in November 2018 that killed two people. Pakistan’s natural gas-rich Baluchistan province borders Afghanistan and Iran, as well as the Pakistani province of Sindh, where Karachi serves as the capital.

One issue that has reinvigorated the group in recent years is the Chinese multi-billion-dollar project at the port in Gwadar, a prot on the Arabian Sea that is located in Baluchistan. The Baluchistan militant group has opposed China’s BRI initiative, which in addition to reviving the port is building a new project to connect the Gwadar port to the Chinese border.

As Valdis Dombrovskis complains to ESMA about the epic lapse by Germany’s Bonn-based financial regulator, BaFin, the German government is scrambling to save face. Not only are Chancellor Angela Markel and Finance Minister Olaf Scholz worried about scrutiny from Brussels, but a team of savvy litigators leading a major class-action lawsuit against the German government for failing to protect investors is also threatening to win an embarrassingly large settlement that could further erode the German government’s finances as it struggles to justify its break with the “frugal four”.

So, what is Berlin’s plan to try and improve oversight of public companies in the wake of the biggest accounting scandal in postwar German history? Well, it looks like the plan is to hand more power to BaFin, the regulator that’s largely responsible for dropping the ball in the first place. When the FT published whistleblowers’ claims alleging accounting fraud at the company’s Asian business, BaFin reacted by banning short-selling in Wirecard shares, and launching investigations into one of the FT reporters investigating Wirecard.

Instead of inviting a serious rethink of its regulatory framework, Berlin is trying to shift the blame for these failures entirely on to an industry group that had contracted with the German government, essentially allowing the major accounting firms auditing the biggest German companies to regulate themselves.

The government will terminate its contract with the country’s accounting watchdog, the Financial Reporting Enforcement Panel, as early as Monday, according to officials briefed on the matter. The power to launch investigations into companies’ financial reporting would then be handed to BaFin, Germany’s financial regulator, the officials said.

[…]

FREP, a private-sector body with quasi-official power, monitors the financial reporting of listed companies on behalf of the government. “What the Wirecard affair has shown is that…self-regulation by the auditors doesn’t work properly,” Jörg Kukies, Germany’s deputy finance minister told the Financial Times. “So we will inevitably have to question whether the bodies that currently regulate the industry should continue to do so in their current form.”

It begs the question: If Germany is so worried about the reputation of its financial services industry (which it certainly should be after suffering a collapse on par with Enron) why does it simply think handing even more power to BaFin will solve the problem? Not only are the top officials at the regulator still in control, they responded to the scandal with the boilerplate apologies and platitudes, but said little about actual reform, aside assuming more power to aggressively investigate companies after being alerted to potential wrongdoing.

The Wirecard affair has proved highly embarrassing for the German government, which fears it could damage the reputation of the country’s financial services industry. Through her spokesman, Chancellor Angela Merkel on Friday described the case as “alarming”, while Olaf Scholz, finance minister, called it “a scandal which is almost unprecedented in the world of finance.”

“We should see the Wirecard story as a signal to address these problems, which have existed for quite a long time now, and to find radical solutions,” Mr Kukies said. “Only then can we contain the fallout from this affair.” Mr Kukies, a former Goldman Sachs banker who joined the finance ministry in 2018, said BaFin “currently has very limited powers” to oversee accountancy firms in Germany. “We have to think about how the regulatory regime should be changed,” he added.

Instead, Scholz has defended BaFin, claiming its decision to ban short selling in Wirecard shares was justified, and despite offering a “scathing criticism” of his own actions (per BBG) BaFin President Felix Hufeld remains in charge, and has no plans to resign. He largely blamed the failures on the auditors, despite BaFin’s very real actions to act as de facto lapdogs for Markus Braun and Wirecard management.

Germany’s galaxy brain plan to reform accounting oversight in the wake of the Wirecard fiasco: hand more power to BaFin. https://t.co/wMrGV63v6G

— Robert Smith (@BondHack) June 28, 2020

As one twitter wit joked, the German government might as well “cancel audits completely, ban short selling completely, and make negative opinions about German companies illegal.  BaFin can oversee the application of the rules, without oversight. Make Braun head of Bafin. Problem solved.”

😂

— Robert Smith (@BondHack) June 28, 2020

Famed short-seller Muddy Waters joked that the decision was tantamount to putting OJ Simpson in charge of Family Court.

That makes sense. While Germany is busy pursuing such sensible reforms, why don’t they appoint OJ Simpson to run their family court system?

— MuddyWatersResearch (@muddywatersre) June 28, 2020

For those who haven’t been following the scandal, here’s what happened: Via a complex shell game involving Wirecard’s parent entity in Germany its regional subsidiaries, the company was able to hide the missing ~$2 billion (€1.9 billion, technically speaking) from its auditor, Ernst & Young, for three years, as we explained a few days ago. Of course, it’s not like EY looked very hard; indeed, it never even bothered to check on the funds that Wirecard said were stashed in a special account in Singapore.

Now, Wirecard CEO Markus Braun is out on bail, and the DAX 30 is one company short. But most importantly, the scandal showed that payments is just one more area of the European financial system that is poorly regulated, and easily exploited, not unlike its AML controls.

Authored by Raul Diego via MintPressNews.com,

COVI-PASS will determine whether you can go to a restaurant, if you need a medical test, or are due for a talking-to by authorities in a post-COVID world. Consent is voluntary, but enforcement will be compulsory.

Through the magic of Internet meme culture, most Millennials will be familiar with the famous opening scene of the 1942 film, “Casablanca,” where two policemen stop a civilian in the “old Moorish section” of Nazi-occupied French Morocco and ask him for his “papers.” The subject is taken away at once after failing to produce the required documents. The cinematic exchange has been used ever since as a popular reference to the ever-encroaching hand of the state, which is now on the verge of attaining a level of control over people’s movements that puts the crude Nazi methods to shame.

A British cybersecurity company, in partnership with several tech firms, is rolling out the COVI-PASS in 15 countries across the world; a “digital health passport” that will contain your COVID-19 test history and other “relevant health information.” According to the company website, the passport’s objective is “to safely return to work” and resume “social interactions” by providing authorities with “up-to-date and authenticated health information.”

These objectives mirror those that Bill Gates has been promoting since the start of the COVID-19 lockdown. In an essay written by Gates in April, the software geek-cum-philanthropist lays out his support for the draconian measures taken in response to the virus and, like an old-timey mob boss, suggests the solutions to this deliberately imposed problem. Ironically, Gates begins to make his case for the adoption of mass tracking and surveillance technology in the U.S. by saying that “For now, the United States can follow Germany’s example”; He then touts the advantages of the “voluntary adoption of digital tools” so we can “remember where [we] have been” and can “choose to share it with whoever comes to interview you about your contacts.”

COVI-Pass promises to work as digital health passport, allowing users deemed uninfected to attend public gatherings among other privileges

Gates goes on to predict that the ability to attend public events in the near future will depend on the discovery of an effective treatment. But he remains pessimistic that any such cure will be good enough in the short term to make people “feel safe to go out again.” These warnings by the multi-billionaire dovetail perfectly with the stated purposes of the aforementioned COVI-PASS, whose development is also being carried out in partnership with Redstrike Group – a sports marketing consultancy firm that is working with England’s Premier League and their Project Restart to parse ticket sales and only make them available to people who have tested negative for the virus.

VST Enterprises goes viral

VST Enterprises Ltd (VSTE) is led by 31-year old entrepreneur, Louis-James Davis, who very recently stepped down from a “science & technology ambassadorship” in the African nation of Zimbabwe to focus on the company’s role in the UN’s SDG (Sustainable Development Goals) Collaboratory initiative, comprising a series of “cyber technology projects across all 193 member states of the United Nations.”

These will use the same proprietary VCode and VPlatform technologies underpinning the COVI-PASS that will reportedly tackle issues such as illegal mining and counterfeiting. This “third generation” barcode technology overcomes the limitations of older “second generation” versions like QR-codes, according to Davis. “Data and sensitive information scanned or stored in either a QR code and barcode can be hacked and are inherently insecure,” Davis claims, “leaving data and personal details to be compromised.” These, and other flaws of the prevailing “proximity apps” were exploited by VST Enterprises to position itself to land large government and private sector contracts.

By all measures, the strategy has proven wildly successful and VST now enjoys strong favor in the highest circles of the UK government as evidenced by the ringing endorsement of former Prime Minister Theresa May, prominently displayed on the COVI-PASS website. More practically, VST now has a direct partnership with the UK government and has secured contracts to deploy its technology in 15 countries, including Italy, Portugal, France, India, the US, Canada, Sweden, Spain, South Africa, Mexico, United Arab Emirates and the Netherlands.

In May, VST signed a deal with international digital health technology firm and owner of COVI-PASS, Circle Pass Enterprises (CPE) to integrate VST’s VCode into the biometric RFID-enabled “passports” which can be accessed via mobile phone or a key fob will flash colored lights to denote if an individual has tested negative, positive or is to be denied entry to public locations. Awarded the ‘Seal of Excellence’ by the EU, VCode® technology will ensure that all of our most sensitive personal and health information can be accessed by authorities at a distance, dispensing with messy and potentially dangerous face-to-face encounters with police or other enforcement personnel.

Infusing the narrative

So far, the concerns over the digital health passport’s threat to freedom and privacy have been lukewarm at best and it seems as if the world has already accepted that full-fledged population control methods such as these will simply be a fact of life. While the coronavirus pandemic has certainly done much to bring the public over to this way of thinking, the campaign to normalize this sort of Orwellian power-grab has been ongoing for many years and Bill Gates – who many media outlets have whitewashed out of stories related to these measures – has been at the forefront of its promotion.

The Innovation for Uptake, Scale and Equity in Immunisation (INFUSE) project was launched in Davos, Switzerland in 2016. The program was developed by an organization funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation called GAVI (The Vaccine Alliance), which has been calling for a digital health ID for children along with partners in the broader !D2020 initiative like the Rockefeller Foundation and Microsoft.

In a recent interview, the deputy director of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Hassan Damluji, derided the idea that the COVID-19 pandemic was in any way subsiding and even warned that, far from receding, the pandemic was “deep into wave three.” His remarks were specifically targeted to the very regions he oversees for the foundation, which include the Middle East and parts of Asia, which he stressed would be the focus of the next wave. Damluji was “most recently involved in a five-year fundraising cycle for GAVI,” an effort led by Saudi Arabia, whose investment he praised as a powerful “signal [that] others had an obligation to follow.”

Gates concludes his editorial with a comparison to World War II, stating that said conflict was a “defining moment of our parents’ generation” as the COVID-19 pandemic is to ours, implying that the changes taking place now are akin to the Allied forces’ defeat of the Third Reich. Except, of course, that immunity passports or digital health certificates sound exactly like what Hitler wished for the most. After all, wasn’t the idea of a superior race based on considerations of superior health and vitality over the ostensibly sick and unfit? Hard to argue against the idea that a universal health passport is nothing less than the ultimate fulfillment of that dystopian nightmare.